Film Screenings / Programs / Series
SHOPPING WORLDS
August 2 – August 17
August 2-17, 2023
To mark the end of summer, we present a series that attends to the social and cultural phenomenon that is the suburban shopping mall. At once a sanctuary and a prison, the mall was a fixture of American life (and cinema) in the 20th century. In recent years, it has become a bastion of nostalgia for generations – now steeped in the internet – who long for human interaction, no matter how superficial and mundane. Perhaps it is that very sense of the mundane – rendered charming through time and distance – that has elevated the placidness of the escalator, the sparkling of indoor fountains, and the airy echoes of Muzak into something so beguiling now.
“Shopping Worlds” offers an escape from the August heat with a selection of mall-core classics, including DAWN OF THE DEAD, MALLRATS, and Chantal Akerman’s GOLDEN EIGHTIES. The mall as a spectacle in and of itself – “retail theatre” as it has been called (by none other than a senior vice-president of the Muzak corporation) – is also on full display in NOCTURAMA, THE PHANTOM OF THE MALL, OBSERVE AND REPORT, and CHOPPING MALL. The once legendary locale for “people watching” has become its own focus of discourse, with documentaries like Frederick Wiseman’s THE STORE, Harun Farocki’s THE CREATORS OF SHOPPING WORLDS, and Hugh Kinniburgh’s MALL CITY laying the structural groundwork for a cultural and aesthetic appreciation of the shopping mall by exploring its architectural elaboration, its civic function, and the economic and technological shifts that brought it into being. A more instinctual, niche form of mall mania thrives in the corners of the internet, as both those who grew up at the mall and those who are too young to have experienced its heyday connect over their shared, emotionally-charged preoccupation with dead and decaying shopping malls. In her book “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall”, Alexandra Lange, invoking Ray Bradbury’s writings on urban planning, describes the mall as “Somewhere to Go”, an idea that forms a peculiar liminality between human experience and commercial excess.
As shopping (and for that matter, movie watching) increasingly becomes an online, home-bound endeavor, “Shopping Worlds” invites you out, to explore the many different dimensions – historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic – that the mall continues to embody.
Programmed by Anne Hart, John Klacsmann, and Jed Rapfogel.
Special thanks to Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Bret Berg (AGFA); Yael Bertana; Chris Chouinard (Park Circus); Rebecca Cleman & Karl McCool (Electronic Arts Intermix); Jem Cohen; Tom Colley (Video Data Bank); Nathan Duncan; Harry Guerro; Bob Hunter (Icarus Films); Jason Jackowski (Universal Pictures); Hugh Kinniburgh; Karen Konicek & Erica Hill (Zipporah Films); Soda_Jerk; and K. F. Watanabe (Grasshopper Film).
Kyle Riismandel, cultural historian, Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark/New Jersey Institute of Technology, and author of “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001” will introduce CHOPPING MALL on Fri, Aug 4. Alexandra Lange, author of “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall”, will introduce the screening of THE STORE on Sun, Aug 6.
Hugh Kinniburgh
MALL CITY
1983-2016, 49 min, video
Made by filmmaker – and then-NYU-film-school-student – Hugh Kinniburgh in 1983, MALL CITY began life as a two-birds-with-one-stone project: the shoot was intended to produce both a music video for Kinniburgh’s band’s song, “Mall City”, and a short documentary for his documentary film class. Shooting at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, Kinniburgh and his small crew conducted on-the-spot, spontaneous interviews with the shoppers and mall rats they encountered, resulting in a 20-minute film that incorporated a few of their interviews and concluded with the music video. More than 30 years later, Kinniburgh revisited his Betamax video footage, recognized its social-historical value, and fashioned an extended version of the film that made room for much more of the interview material. The result is an invaluable time-capsule of the heyday of a typical suburban East Coast shopping mall, which has found a new life on the internet.
“I wonder where all those people are now. The kids must be in their late 40’s and 50’s. The old folks are gone. Record stores, the music store, video arcades…all just memories now. I’m glad we captured an essential part of east coast American life.” – Hugh Kinniburgh
Preceded by:
Dan Graham DEATH BY CHOCOLATE: WEST EDMONTON SHOPPING MALL (1986-05) 2005, 8 min, digital
Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, DEATH BY CHOCOLATE draws on nearly twenty years’ worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public, and its unique aesthetic world. This work also provides a corollary to Graham’s own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.
Cheryl Donegan FLUSHING 2003, 4 min, digital
“Shot at the Flushing Mall in Queens, New York, Flushing is a tour of a mall that doesn’t live up to the glossy standards of typical American consumer palaces, but is thereby perhaps a better place to understand the yearnings for fantasy via retailing.” –Cheryl Donegan
Jaime Davidovich THE GAP 1982-83, 16 min, video
Created for the Long Beach Museum of Art and aired as an episode of Davidovich’s cable-access program “The Live! Show”, this evening-news-style “special” finds him field-reporting on the status of video art in Long Beach, California. Davidovich visits a local shopping mall to poll strangers of all stripes and analyze their attitudes about the future of electronic art.
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Wed, Aug 2 at 6:45, Fri, Aug 11 at 9:30, and Wed, Aug 16 at 6:45.
Richard Friedman
PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC’S REVENGE
1989, 91 min, 35mm
High school sweethearts Eric Matthews and Melody Austin are in love. But their romance is cut tragically short when Eric dies in a fire. One year later, Melody is trying to move on with her life and works at the newly built Midwood Mall. But the mall, which stands on the very site of Eric’s former home, has an uninvited guest: a shadowy, scarred figure who is hellbent on getting revenge against the mall’s crooked developers! Featuring star turns from MTV's Pauly Shore, Morgan Fairchild (DALLAS), and Ken Foree (DAWN OF THE DEAD), PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC’S REVENGE is the finest slasher variant on THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA ever made. If you don’t believe us, wait until the scene where a bloody eyeball shows up in someone’s frozen yogurt.
Preceded by:
Cecelia Condit POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN 1983, 11.5 min, video
An operatic fairy tale of cannibalism, desire, and dread in Middle America, a densely collaged narrative in which Beauty meets the Beast in the surreal landscape of shopping-mall suburbia. Two women with a penchant for “violence and perfume” take revenge on their animal-masked male persecutor. In this contemporary rendering of gothic enchantment, victim becomes aggressor and the familiar becomes the fantastic. POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN is a classic tale of psychosexual horror, retold as an irreverent fantasy of the other.
Total running time: ca. 105 min.
Wed, Aug 2 at 9:00, Tues, Aug 8 at 9:00, and Fri, Aug 11 at 7:00.
Harun Farocki
THE CREATORS OF SHOPPING WORLDS / DIE SCHÖPFER DER EINKAUFSWELTEN
2001, 72 min, video. In English and German with English subtitles.
“Shopping is an everyday cultural act; it is inevitable, taken for granted. Entering into the world of shopping – the world of shopping malls – can be a Dantean voyage into hell or a redeeming ceremony of Communion. Everyone is familiar with this experience and knows what a mall looks like. This self-evident phenomenon is, however, the result of a highly complex process. The designing of shopping malls is overseen by an army of planners, managers and scientists: there are consultants, re-launch analysts, a central association, mall magazines. 6,000 guests and laboratories attended an annual convention in Las Vegas at which such questions were investigated as where the gaze of a customer falls and how a ‘spontaneous’ purchase can be induced. Farocki shows how mall producers look at malls when they want to find out, for example, how passers-by move, where they stop and where they reach for an article. He adds these images to the everyday ones – and gives them a magical charge.” –Antje Ehmann
Preceded by:
Yael Bartana ODDS AND ENDS 2005, 4 min, digital
ODDS AND ENDS invades the space of a shopping center – big, loud, pink. It is a meditation on consumerism and a narrative about individuals caught up in a process that mostly exceeds their will and control. Sometimes shot from above, it comprises a series of memorable images piled one after the other in a sequence that is joyful and critically distanced at the same time.
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Thurs, Aug 3 at 6:45 and Sat, Aug 12 at 7:00.
Kevin Smith
MALLRATS
1995, 94 min, 35mm
Kevin Smith’s follow-up to his landmark debut, CLERKS, centers on two loafers, Jeremy London and Jason Lee, who spend way too much time hanging out at the mall. When Brodie (Lee) is dumped by his girlfriend, Shannen Doherty, he retreats to the mall with his best friend TS (London), whose girlfriend has also left him. Between brooding and visits to the food court, the unmotivated twosome decide to win their girlfriends back with the help of the ultimate delinquents, Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) and Jay (Jason Mewes), whose continuing adventures take the word “nuisance” to a whole new level.
Thurs, Aug 3 at 9:00 and Wed, Aug 9 at 6:45.
Chantal Akerman
GOLDEN EIGHTIES
1986, 96 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of Janus Films and the Royal Belgian Film Archive.
“The exuberant enchantments of the singing, dancing musical meet the feminist, formalist sensibility of Chantal Akerman in this uniquely captivating vision of love and survival in the age of late capitalism. Amid the consumerist wonderland of a shopping mall, a cadre of store employees bounce in and out of one another’s arms in a cycle of breakups, makeups, misunderstandings, and reunions, their romantic roundelay punctuated by imaginatively stylized production numbers. Working with frequent star Delphine Seyrig and a remarkable team of writers – who between them penned everything from JULES AND JIM to DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN – Akerman deftly balances the shiny pop pleasures of the genre with piercing variations on her signature themes, including a startlingly moving reflection on Jewish resilience and the legacy of the Holocaust.” –CRITERION
Preceded by:
Ayo Akingbade DEADPHANT 2020, 3 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
A portrait of Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre in South London, a weekend before it permanently closed, after 55 years, on September 24, 2020.
Fri, Aug 4 at 6:45, Sat, Aug 12 at 9:15, and Thurs, Aug 17 at 6:30.
Jim Wynorski
CHOPPING MALL
1986, 77 min, 35mm-to-DCP
CHOPPING MALL is a joyous hybrid of FRIDAY THE 13TH and DAWN OF THE DEAD…with robots! A group of horny teens, including Barbara Crampton (RE-ANIMATOR) and Kelli Maroney (NIGHT OF THE COMET), sneak into a mall. But they soon find themselves confronted with a team of blood-thirsty, high-tech Robo-killers. Packed with familiar faces from the Roger Corman stable (Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Dick Miller), this movie crams more slit-throats, lasers, and exploding robots into 77 minutes than most filmmakers can muster in an entire career.
Fri, Aug 4 at 9:15, Tues, Aug 8 at 7:00, and Thurs, Aug 10 at 9:15.
Bertrand Bonello
NOCTURAMA
2016, 130 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.
NOCTURAMA is a terrorism thriller like no other, recalling Robert Bresson’s THE DEVIL, PROBABLY as much as it does George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD. We first follow a group of tense, shifty adolescents as they prowl the streets and subways of Paris, learning through carefully delineated sequences that they’re already well underway with a bombing plot. And then it becomes something familiar, yet altogether different, as these subversives tuck away inside a shopping mall and lose themselves in consumer culture – clothes, televisions, toys, and a stirring soundtrack that includes Blondie, Chief Keef, Shirley Bassey, Bonello’s menacing electronic score, and Willow Smith. Will they survive the unseen, encroaching authorities? Or, as the walls close in, will they even survive each other? NOCTURAMA forgoes easy answers.
Sat, Aug 5 at 5:00, Sun, Aug 13 at 9:00, and Wed, Aug 16 at 8:45.
George A. Romero
DAWN OF THE DEAD
1978, 126 min, 35mm-to-digital
“George Romero’s sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is a more accomplished and more knowing film, tapping into two dark and dirty fantasies – wholesale slaughter and wholesale shopping – to create a grisly extravaganza with an acute moral intelligence. The graphic special effects (which sometimes suggest a shotgun Jackson Pollock) are less upsetting than Romero’s way of drawing the audience into the violence. As four survivors of the zombie war barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall, our loyalties and human sympathies are made to shift with frightening ease. Romero’s sensibility approaches the Swiftian in its wit, accuracy, excess, and profound misanthropy.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER
Plus: A selection of shopping mall TV ads from the 1970s & 80s!
Total running time: ca. 140 min.
Sat, Aug 5 at 8:00.
Frederick Wiseman
THE STORE
1983, 118 min, 16mm
THE STORE is a film about the main Neiman-Marcus store and corporate headquarters in Dallas. The sequences in the film include the selection, presentation, marketing, pricing, advertising, and selling of a vast array of consumer products including designer clothes and furs, jewelry, perfumes, shoes, electronic products, sportswear, china and porcelain and many other goods. The internal management and organizational aspects of a large corporation are shown, i.e., sales meetings, development of marketing and advertising strategies, training, personnel practices and sales techniques.
Sun, Aug 6 at 5:15 and Mon, Aug 14 at 6:30. Intro by writer Alexandra Lange on Sun, Aug 6!
Quentin Tarantino
JACKIE BROWN
1997, 154 min, 35mm. With Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, and Michael Keaton.
JACKIE BROWN is Tarantino’s supreme achievement, and still hands-down his most fully accomplished, impressively understated film. The master of pastiche, Tarantino here channels the gritty, low-key, human-scaled urban crime films of the 1970s, and the result is enormously satisfying, genuinely capturing not only the superficial trappings of the genre but the genuine flavor of a period in which crime films focused on texture, character, and process rather than sensation or spectacle. Tarantino’s privileging of dialogue and interaction over plot has never been put to such good use, and the film’s sublimely patient pacing, heartfelt affection for its characters, and refusal to indulge in cinematic fireworks, inspires an enormous nostalgia for a period rife with down-to-earth genre films. JACKIE BROWN centers on an intricate smuggling operation/robbery – depicted via a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives – that plays out in the decidedly unglamorous, banal confines of a shopping mall department store and food court.
Sun, Aug 6 at 8:00, Thurs, Aug 10 at 6:00, and Sat, Aug 12 at 3:30.
Rosine Mbakam
CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE
2018, 70 min, digital. In French with English subtitles. Distributed by Icarus Films.
CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE takes place entirely inside a tiny salon in an underground shopping mall in the immigrant Brussels district of Matonge, where the charismatic, larger-than-life Sabine and her employees style extensions and glue on lashes while watching soaps, dishing romantic advice, sharing rumors about government programs to legalize migrants, and talking about life back home in West Africa. More than a place for women to get their hair done, Jolie Coiffure serves as a community hub for West African women. Fueled by endless cans of soda and cups of McDonald’s coffee, Sabine recruits for a tontine (an investment scheme paying each member a yearly annuity), organizes accommodation for a pregnant woman who lacks immigration papers, and, in quieter, more introspective moments, tells of her own harrowing journey to Belgium after working as a domestic under terrible conditions in Lebanon. Meanwhile, students and tourist groups walk past, pausing at the window and gawking. (At one point, Sabine urges Mbakam to turn her camera on them so they’ll go away; the director obliges.) CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE is a highly revealing documentary, capturing the day-to-day lives and concerns of immigrant West African women in a space they can call their own.
Mon, Aug 7 at 7:00 and Tues, Aug 15 at 9:00.
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Jem Cohen
CHAIN
2004, 99 min, DCP
“Shot over several years in a variety of countries, CHAIN is a quietly corrosive portrait of two women drifting through a not-quite-locatable world of malls, corporate centers, and hotels. The film occupies the fertile ground where documentary and fiction converge, and registers a darkening emotional current in Cohen’s work, riding on a mix of yearning and skepticism, tenderness and outrage.” –Michael Almereyda
“I began the project by deciding to focus on the corporate and commercial landscapes that I had previously ‘framed out’ in my filmmaking, and to try to understand how these places were affecting the people within them. Wal-Mart, for example, opens a new store roughly every two days and yet the actual sites of such developments often take on a strange invisibility. Their presence can begin to seem inevitable and even natural. Rather than examining this phenomenon through the facts, experts, and arguments of the traditional documentary, CHAIN tells the stories of two women as this environment shapes their lives.” –Jem Cohen
Mon, Aug 7 at 9:00 and Tues, Aug 15 at 6:30. Jem Cohen will be here in person for both screenings!
Jody Hill
OBSERVE AND REPORT
2009, 86 min, 35mm
“Consider OBSERVE AND REPORT as spiritual exercise for your heart. Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) is the security chief at Forest Ridge Mall. He is a foul-mouthed young man with a chip on his shoulder. Most of the people he regularly encounters on his job experience him as a socially awkward person who makes them feel uncomfortable. He always seems to say the wrong things. […] Test yourself with OBSERVE AND REPORT, a raucous comedy written and directed by Jody Hill. See if you can open your heart to the struggle of this obnoxious and violent young man with outlandish dreams of grandeur. Does he push any of your buttons? Pay attention to see if there are any moments in the film when you actually sympathize with Ronnie’s plight and his ungainly attempt to redeem himself after blowing everything. We live in a society that accentuates the negative and always looks for flaws in people. OBSERVE AND REPORT, if you want to live dangerously, can point you in another direction, looking for the good even in loathsome individuals.” –Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, SPIRITUALITY & PRACTICE
Wed, Aug 9 at 9:15 and Mon, Aug 14 at 9:15.
DEAD MALLS: URBAN EXPLORING INTERNET VIDEOS
This program will channel the online video subculture devoted to exploring “dead” malls. The internet is replete with videos short and long (sometimes epically long) that find their authors indulging a strange compulsion to break into once-thriving, now-shuttered shopping centers, and to systematically document every abandoned, deteriorating space within, like anthropologists or explorers excavating the ancient ruins of a vanished culture – which in some sense is exactly what these structures represent.
Sun, Aug 13 at 4:00.
Bradford Thomason & Brett Whitcomb
JASPER MALL
2020, 85 min, DCP
A dying shopping mall outside of Birmingham, Alabama, its patrons, and its tenants embody the diversity and tenderness of American culture in a changing South.
“Hands down the best film about the death of a shopping mall. Our tour guide is a jack-of-all-trades former Australian zookeeper leading an elegiac tour deep into the bowels of an Alabama mall on life support. JASPER MALL is a lyrical, surprisingly deep, thoughtful investigation into the sclerotic heart of the American Dream. Quirky and inventive, it holds up to the best of Errol Morris. It is DEATH OF A SALESMAN retold as DEATH OF A SHOPPING MALL.” –Jeffrey Radice, SLAMDANCE
Preceded by:
Sam Green & Carrie Lozano UTOPIA, PART 3: THE WORLD’S LARGEST SHOPPING MALL 2009, 13 min, digital
Four years after its construction, the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou – the largest mall in the world – sits virtually empty of both shops and shoppers. But the South China Mall is considered too big to fail. So, employees line up for flag-raising ceremonies and pep talks about “brand building” before going off to meticulously maintain the deserted concourses.
Nathan S. Duncan GHOST MALL 2011, 7 min, digital
A truly ghostly portrait of a dying mall in Austin, Texas, GHOST MALL comprises images of the shopping center’s almost entirely depopulated spaces, whose emptiness is all the more haunting thanks to the soundtrack of audio recordings in which several people share memories of formative experiences that took place there.
Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Sun, Aug 13 at 6:15 and Thurs, Aug 17 at 9:00.
